Stop Wasting Time “Running” Painting Equipment!

If you want to manage your painting business more effectively, you must use simple paperwork and procedures to eliminate common, recurring problems. Remember: If a “problem” happens week after week – it’s not a problem. It’s a CHOICE! Choose to build a better company starting with this simple operational tip…

For Those Who Would Rather Read Than Watch, Here’s the Video Transcription:

How many times have you been in the middle of something very important, productively making sales follow up calls, productively working on generating commercial repaint leads, productively running customer reactivation campaigns, sending out newsletters, running referral routes for other referral sources et cetera, and you get a call right.

You finally sit down, you get some peace and quiet to do something that’s actually going to make you money and you get a call that Jose or Joe or Earl forgot the 30ft, 40ft, 50ft ladder on the Johnson job that is clear across the country. Forgot to pick up the packet of drywall mud, forgot to pickup the ladder jacks.

So you get to leave your thousand dollar an hour, five hundred dollar an hour work to go be a ten dollar an hour employee and spend two and a half hours in the car. Is this a good idea?

I’m gonna submit to you that it isn’t. I’m Brandon Lewis with the Academy for Professional Painting Contractors, I’ve got a quick tip for you. Create an equipment checklist and make certain that it is in each and every job packet before people go out to the field. Here’s how this works.

Every time you estimate a project, right then, whether you close the project or not, you simply take an equipment checklist and you look around at the project and you go, “Huh 24, six foot, eight foot, ladder jacks, pressure washer, roto tip.” And you simply take a little piece of paper and a pencil and you check off everything that if you were gonna get that project, that a painter would need. You do it immediately, right then while you’re at the project whether you get it or not, before you even know that the sales are gonna close.

It takes maybe three minutes, probably not three, probably takes 60 seconds an estimate. You put that in the file and when the job closes, now on the day that the job starts, you can stand out in your warehouse or at your home or whatever, you can look at the scope of work along with all the supporting documentation that’s in your job packet, you can hand it to Jose, Joe, Earl whomever, and make certain that their truck has everything on that checklist they need.

What that two or three minutes of time invested does is it just about virtually eliminates the need to ever run equipment to anyone. So if you’ve got a continuous and constant problem in your painting business with running equipment then this is the process and the paperwork that can almost eliminate that.

There are other things you can do to help with this on the rare occasion that it happens, but I promise you if you institute this, you’ll get rid of 80-90% of any of this equipment running stuff that’s taking you away from sales marketing and operational improvement and hiring, recruitment, things that are actually gonna make you money.

So I’m Brandon Lewis with the Painters Academy saying, get a checklist, okay? Let’s not make the same mistakes over and over again for 10, 15, 20, 30 years. Let’s identify the common mistakes and put paperwork and processes in place that eliminate them. Until next time, go get ’em.